Our Community PV Projects

Two community owned photovoltaic systems were installed in December 2011 in Whittington (St Giles Hospice and Whittington Village Hall). They are both eligible for the government’s Feed in Tariff scheme.

The team at St Giles hospice, Whittington

You can login to check out how the PV is performing

Our online monitoring system is connected to both arrays and is now up and running, allowing performance data to be viewed from wherever there is a connection to the internet. Members are welcome to access the system and check out how much electricity is being generated that day, or to view weekly and monthly totals from July to date. Simply input login details as follows: username – stgiles; password – hospice.

In September 2016 our second project was completed: having raised over £335,000 via a community share offer, we were able to install PV systems on seven properties belonging to the University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust (including Stafford and Royal Stoke hospitals), and an additional system on St Giles Hospice, Whittington. The surplus from this scheme will be aimed at an innovative project, which we call Saving Lives with Solar, to help those in the area affected by health conditions related to fuel poverty. Consultants in A&E will identify those people who continually present there with such health conditions and will request the patients’ permission to refer them to fuel poverty charity, Beat The Cold, who will then help the patient address as many factors as possible that are contributing to their inability to maintain a warm, dry home.

SSCE has been working hard in conjunction with Beat The Cold and UHNM to get the Saving Lives with Solar project off the ground and make it “business as usual” for the consultants at UHNM: this work is now beginning to see real results with referrals to BtC increasing. While the financial surplus accumulated, the work by BtC was funded by a grant from the National Energy Agency, but in 2018 SSCE was in a position to allocate the whole of the surplus from the Hospitals project – just over £12,000 – to BtC to continue the Saving Lives with Solar project. We expect payments to continue to be made every year.